By Mohammed Bello Doka
ABUJA — A visiting American fact-finding delegation has formally declared that a “Christian genocide” is taking place in Nigeria, following a comprehensive field investigation spanning several years across conflict-ravaged communities in the North and Middle Belt regions.
The team, led by former U.S. Ambassador Lewis Lucke and Mayor Mike Arnold, founder of Africa Arise International and Africa Arise USA, made the damning pronouncement at a world press briefing held at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja, on Tuesday, October 14, 2025.
Presenting the delegation’s formal statement, Mike Arnold, who previously served as Mayor of Blanco, Texas, said the team’s findings—based on over five years of fieldwork, interviews, and documentation—confirm that the violence and mass displacement targeting Christian communities across Nigeria “meets every definition of genocide under international law.”
Arnold revealed that the mission, which included Pastor Jed D’Grace and Mr. Judd Saul, was independently funded and conducted with the knowledge of key U.S. lawmakers, including Senator Ted Cruz and Congressman Chip Roy, as well as officials in the U.S. State Department and the White House.
> “We have interviewed survivors, governors, ministers, traditional rulers, and even former presidents. We have walked through the ruins of Christian communities from Bokkos to Gwoza, from Jos to Makoko. We have filmed over 80 hours of testimonies and evidence at great personal risk,” Arnold said. “This is not a random conflict—it is a deliberate campaign of extermination.”
The group’s field findings document a “consistent and chilling pattern” of targeted destruction, including the burning of churches, killings of Christian villagers, and mass displacements allegedly perpetrated by radical jihadist groups, many of them linked to Fulani militant networks.
> “Across regions, churches are destroyed while mosques remain untouched,” Arnold noted. “Villages are erased, Christian homes torched, and survivors labeled as criminals or vagrants. It is a systematic campaign of terror disguised as ‘farmer-herder clashes.’”
According to the mission, over four million Nigerians—the majority of them Christians—are currently displaced by what Arnold described as a “politically engineered war of religious and demographic conquest.” He accused both local and international actors of deliberately downplaying the crisis for political and economic gains.
The team’s report further alleges that illicit mining operations—valued at over $9 billion annually—are intertwined with the violence, with displaced lands quickly occupied and exploited for gold, tin, and lithium extraction by well-connected interests.
> “Heavy machinery appears on captured lands just days after communities are destroyed,” Arnold claimed. “This is blood-mineral extraction under the cover of religion.”
Citing the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), Arnold said the documented atrocities—including targeted killings, mass displacements, and the destruction of Christian identity—constitute clear acts of genocide under Articles II (a) to (e).
He called on the international community, especially the United States and the UN Human Rights Council, to take urgent diplomatic and humanitarian action, warning that “to deny this reality is to be complicit in the crimes.”
> “I stand here not as a foreign critic, but as a friend of Nigeria,” Arnold said emotionally. “I believe in Christian-Muslim harmony and in Nigeria’s bright future. But healing cannot begin until truth is spoken—and the truth is that a genocide is happening right now.”
The delegation’s statement has since been distributed to senior U.S. officials, international media outlets including The New York Times, and human rights bodies for further investigation and policy response.
The Nigerian government has yet to issue an official reaction to the report as of press time.
Tags
News